Friday, April 28, 2006

April 29

A suburban Saturday morning blog from 44 Chelmsford Street, where the air is full of enthusiastic hammer blows and the more refined whining of a drill or circular saw from numbers 36-42. A cluster of terraces with their corrugated roofs and working-class ghosts are being demolished to make way for nice white town houses with 3 bedrooms and four bathrooms (so hard to keep clean in these dirty times.) I had planned to go for a run with my friend the corporate lawyer but twisted my ankle chasing the neighborhood alley cats out of the back yard and had to cancel. My Prospective Spouse is snoring in bed after his hard week at the office and I'm inclined to wonder what's become of us and if we will suffocate in this cosy domestic corner we have painted ourselves into.

On Thursday we went to see a film at the German film festival about a compulsive rapist and a woman who falls in love with him, with my old schoolfriend Annabell and her philosopher boyfriend Daniel. Miraculously the philosopher didn't develop the headache which generally comes on when it's time to meet with us and so the movie was followed by a midnight stroll down Oxford Street, pass the drag queens and the Thursday clubbers, discussing love and morality, love and rationality, morality and aesthetics (all with reference to compulsive rapists and the women who love them.) Daniel (philosophically qualified to lead such discussions) constructed a disquisition on the topic which proceeded in the seamless style of a public speech or an essay while Annabell tugged his sleeve and looked furtively about for a taxi.

Saturday, April 22, 2006

April 23

Home sick from work on Friday- having a bath and waiting for Marcin to come home reminded me of winter trips to Poland. The division of the day into segments of time to kill, the early anticipation of his return, waiting for life to begin. Dragging myself eventually from a warm nest of blankets long after he had left, a desultory cruise of the internet which never gave quite as much satisfaction as it promised. Writing for an hour or so in a sort of desperation, thinking that it was the only thing that could justify my housewifely presence there.

Eventually I would be driven out by cabin fever or the presence of housemates in the middle of the afternoon to walk along the river: by this time the pale sluggish sun which had heaved itself onto the horizon for a few hours would be almost ready to sink exhausted into long dusk. The river was a sort of consolation prize, a vein of wildness colonising the heart of the city, thick with plates of ice with raised rims of ice shavings caused by the rubbing as they jostled and eddied against each other in the current. It is a monochrome world completely exotic to me, a world assimilated through early absorption of European fairy tales of wolves and cold forests, but never seen. A world in suspended animation where motionless fishermen crouch on stools above their ice holes in frozen backwaters, a black and white world of soot and snow. Easy to imagine how it could produce a sort of harshness of character, a dogmatism, an overwhelming moral certainty in its inhabitants (more difficult to accomodate the virulently fertile summers with this theory.)

Home late afternoon, shopping bags in hand. The fat gatekeepers ignore me, having worked out that I don't speak any human language. As the season progresses they don't even bother to leave their heated office. On the wall behind the intercom there is a postcard that Marcin sent them from Africa. I eat something, drink a can of beer. I get into the bath and marinate until my body is pliable with heat and dress myself with the care of a kept woman . Then I arrange myself on the couch to wait for the sound of the intercom buzzing ( I am in possession of the only keys) and the footsteps of my love on the stairs, the aura of cold emanating from his skin, the kiss in the doorway. I have buried another brief, barren day.

Thursday, April 20, 2006

April 21

My love and I are sampling the degrees of physical misery available on today's market, he with a broken collarbone and I with a mucus-laden chest. On Monday at an unspecified point somewhere on the Ingar fire trail we had our first encounter with downhill drama when Marcin hit a rock at the speed of 50 km/hr and flew through the air with the greatest of ease while several shocked spectators looked on. Rounding the corner a minute of two later at my pensioner's pace, I registered several standing bodies and one crumpled heap and went into an entirely self-interested process of elimination to ascertain whether he was amongst the standing or the fallen. And there he was, glaze-eyed and grunting and clutching at his arm in the gutter beside the track- luckily the bystanders were both less shocked and more competent than me, having no vested interests at stake, and took command and called an ambulance, rigged a sling out of a spare tube and made sure he was warm. And so to hospital- x-rays, stitches, painkillers, lights in the eyes and large scale disinfection- it was such a long process that I recovered from my shock and started to regret the sheer inconvenience of it all. As for the doctors and nurses and emergency staff: what sort of people live a life constructed out of glimpses of other people's life-changing moments, and make death and injury their daily bread? They are soldiers of sorts, living in an atmosphere of extremity and trying somehow to accept it as normality .

Thursday, April 13, 2006

April 13

Yesterday, struggling with the looming apparition of my own ordinariness, I recounted the Seduction of Abebe Birera to my workmates- an English slapper, a misogynist Irishman, a wide-eyed dancer from the western suburbs and a depressed homosexual of indeterminate years. This is a story in which an Australian woman in her late twenties deflowers a tennage Ethiopian virgin in the hill town of Gondar, assisted by a litre of honey wine and a low grade episode of mania, for no other reason than that she feels like it (he doesn't object either.) The Ethiopian virgin is also of undisclosed age but dances like a young Michael Jackson and produces charming grammatical aberrances like 'shoeses' and 'stuffs' which is enough to override the horrible possibility that he may not be eighteen- as he claims - but something rather closer to sixteen. He is five foot tall (the pervert cougar is about six), and the romances blossoms in the Gondar cinema where the prospective lovers court over a bunch of chat, five cigarettes and an action movie starring an Aryan hero and a man- eating monster. The usher tells Abebe sternly that his mother will be informed.

For the next ten days this romance proceeds in fits and starts, with Sean Paul singing about sexy ladies all over town in the background and the first tiff occurring within days over the presence of an extremely drunk junvenile, asleep with his shoes on in the disgruntled sex tourist's bed. Disgruntled sex tourist takes the cue of the cinema usher and threatens to send drunk juvenile home to mother should this ever occur again. Luckily for all the affair is too brief for this to become a real issue and within a week the sex tourist is on her way out of town in a rattling bus that will- before the trip is over- see the birth of one long-lasting romance between the sex tourist and a Polish architect and the death of one donkey.

Friday, April 07, 2006

April 8

It's autumn at last and in earnest and the city is regaining some of its innocence and enthusiasm after the lethargy of the summer. The dockyards in Balmain, which have been sulking in the heat, are starting to bustle again and the markets at seven in the morning are an indication that the cynicism and obsession with appearances has momentarily abated. Mothers in tracksuits briefly share the world of homebound clubbers at the market cafe- this is bleary-eyed Sydney with her makeup off, lighting her first cigarette, forgetting to pretend for a few minutes. At this time of year I always have a renewal of love for the place and remember that I'm a daughter of the city, and this year it's particularly strong because I've taken up the most quintessential Sydney habit- commuting.

There are millions on the streets but it's not a revolution. It's a perfect metaphor for individualistic society- together but alone, everyone isolated in his private cocoon and not thinking beyond establishing and maintaining his place in the metallic serpent that stretches, gleaming in the sun and shot through with flashes of irritation, from the city across the Anzac Bridge, the Iron Cove Bridge, the Gladesville Bridge and into the hinterland of the western suburbs. Millions of people oscillating uselessly between work and home, picking their noses at the traffic lights and dreaming of what they will consume with the money they've sold their lives for. I can tell you all this with authority because now I'm one of them.

Thursday, April 06, 2006

April 6

Nothing like a day spent in the company of the twitchy, the paranoid, the phobic, the delusional and the just plain poor to make you count your blessings. And to make sure I understood just how well off I really am I read the diagnostic manual for panic disorders and sexual dysfunction and took a long hard look at a picture of a cirrhotic liver. It's not only the starving children of Africa who make you realise how lucky you are to be born a sane middle class white honkey in a first world country.

Tuesday, April 04, 2006

April 5

A weekend in the mountains feeling manic with joy- the weather has turned to autumn and it was possible to ride all day in the coolness with the air so clear that Sydney was visible from the escarpment, clustered on the horizon like a dream city gone smoky grey with distance. The riding was a fantastic mixture of corrugated firetrail and boulder strewn single track and as I rode down to Bedford Creek, deafened by the sound of trembling and distressed metal, I had a flashback to my childhood and my days as Rattletrap Rosie. This name was given to me by Simeon McGovern, the Christadelphian boy down the road , and now I think of it he was named quite aptly as well since he used to ride hunched over his handlebars like a chimpanzee winning the Tour de France. I developed a crush on him as I did (in my rural pragmatism) on every boy in a ten kilometer radius and now that I try to quantify that I realise there were only three of them - Simeon, Ben DeVries and Hrothgar Brennan. Ben DeVries was the most enduring of these passions, and gave early indications of what would be an abiding interest in short brown men. He was lefthanded and mysterious and it ended in tears before it had begun when I asked my younger brother to request his hand on my behalf and he refused.